Paul Prescod’s keynote

Paul is presenting a PowerPoint presentation, good to see!

  • “The farther back you can look, the the farther forward you are likely to see” - Churchill
  • XML is more advanced, in terms of the hype train! What happened to XML, could happen to SVG. SVG is in the trough of disillusionment, just coming onto the slope of enlightment.
  • 4 reasons to believe SVG will succeed:
  • XML and SVG share a demographic (GEEK photo!)
  • SVG is cool, text based - coding not decoding, DOM makes it mutable client-side, every graphic is a program.
  • Content creators less impressed, skills, tools, deployment.
  • Most important for content creators - Do I have to think about code?
  • Code scares graphics people.
  • Where are the demos? - not cartography or computation, we need fun and games. Demo flash game, demo chess SVG game.
  • Content creators can be won over - tool output svg, new tools, transition tools, TOOLS, TOOLS, TOOLS!
  • “If you have an important point to make, hit it 3 times.” Churchill quote (paraphrased)
  • Programmers make tools!
  • XML and SVG are General-Purpose
  • conquer niche by niche.
  • “We shall fight them on the beaches…” - Churchill.
  • Marketing says aim for a niche, too general is bad.
  • Full adoptation takes time.
  • “You have to endure to conquer” - Churchill
  • SVG folks very good at persevering
  • Be patient, binary word still exists, but Office 11 can do XML.
  • Flash is still dominant
  • XML is just as poorly used on the WEB today as SVG, RDF and RSS are there.
  • SVG and XML: Victims of their own success.
  • “The problems of victory are more agreeable than the problems of defeat but no less agrreable” - Churchill/
  • More people means vendors add complexity.
  • Will SVG become more complicated, will there be modularised sufficiently that people can still implement stuff.
  • “This report, by its very length, defends itself from being read” - Churchill
  • When the masses adopt your standard they will use it in all sorts of bizarre and perverse ways - RDF putting a meta-language on top of a meta-language. SOAP is just weird.
  • Is it better to embrace perversity as innovation, or kick the heretics out.
  • XML and SVG the big difference - no MS support for SVG, loves XML, can we get them to join the happy family.
  • We need to evangelise MS, or is there an alternative leader.
  • “They will always do the right thing… after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives” - Churchill (on Americans, but could be on MS)
  • SVG is the right thing.
  • Who will ally with SVG?
  • Standards Wonks, Open source hackers, MS competitors.
  • To conclude XML and SVG, Programmers love them, content creators dont’ yet, both general purpose, full adoption is slow, when SVG is mainstream a new set of challenges will arise.
  • Do MS see SVG as a threat or an opportunity? SVG folks need to build bridges.
  • link mentioned slides presumably available.

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